PeterWatts_Blindsight

Peter Watts 94 Blindsight
I knew all about Chinese Rooms. I was one. I didn't even keep
it a secret, I told anyone who was interested enough to ask.
In hindsight, sometimes that was a mistake.
"How can you possibly tell the rest of us what your bleeding
edge is up to if you don't understand it yourself?" Chelsea
demanded back when things were good between us. Before she
got to know me.
I shrugged. "It's not my job to understand them. If I could, they
wouldn't be very bleeding-edge in the first place. I'm just a, you
know, a conduit."
"Yeah, but how can you translate something if you don't
understand it?"
A common cry, outside the field. People simply can't accept that
patterns carry their own intelligence, quite apart from the semantic
content that clings to their surfaces; if you manipulate the topology
correctly, that content just—comes along for the ride.
"You ever hear of the Chinese Room?" I asked.
She shook her head. "Only vaguely. Really old, right?"
"Hundred years at least. It's a fallacy really, it's an argument that
supposedly puts the lie to Turing tests. You stick some guy in a
closed room. Sheets with strange squiggles come in through a slot
in the wall. He's got access to this huge database of squiggles just
like it, and a bunch of rules to tell him how to put those squiggles
together."
"Grammar," Chelsea said. "Syntax."
I nodded. "The point is, though, he doesn't have any idea what
the squiggles are, or what information they might contain. He only
knows that when he encounters squiggle delta, say, he's supposed
to extract the fifth and sixth squiggles from file theta and put them
together with another squiggle from gamma. So he builds this
response string, puts it on the sheet, slides it back out the slot and
takes a nap until the next iteration. Repeat until the remains of the
horse are well and thoroughly beaten."
"So he's carrying on a conversation," Chelsea said. "In Chinese,
I assume, or they would have called it the Spanish Inquisition."
"Exactly. Point being you can use basic pattern-matching